The Gates Foundation released the results of its long-awaited review of Jeffrey Epstein ties last week, and the verdict, delivered by a law firm the foundation hired and paid, cleared founder Bill Gates of wrongdoing.
Foundation chief executive Mark Suzman retained the Washington law firm WilmerHale in March. Gates and the foundation’s board signed off on the arrangement. Five months later, WilmerHale returned a three-page summary, not the full report, finding no criminal exposure for Gates or the organization he chairs.
The findings undercut the press release’s own framing. WilmerHale counted roughly 30 meetings between Epstein and ten Gates Foundation leaders and staff, Gates among them, spanning 2011 to 2014. Several took place at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. One happened on the foundation’s own campus. Staff flagged the risk of associating with a convicted sex offender more than once, directly to Gates. He kept meeting with Epstein anyway.
The law firm found no evidence Epstein was paid by the foundation and no evidence anyone there knew of his sex-trafficking crimes. It also disclosed the limits of its own work: no access to Gates’ personal communications, no review of his dealings with Epstein outside his foundation role, nothing on Gates Ventures or the Gates Foundation Trust. A five-month inquiry, commissioned by the man whose conduct it examined, reached conclusions favorable to that man, built on a record he controlled.
Call this what it is: a cover-up for hire. A powerful foundation retained a politically connected law firm to sanitize the conduct of its billionaire founder, and the arrangement worked exactly as designed. WilmerHale did not investigate Gates. It investigated Gates’ foundation, with Gates’ cooperation, on terms Gates controlled, and returned a summary Gates could live with.
I know something about what happens to people who raise these questions without a law firm on retainer. In May 2023, I stood at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha, presenting a shareholder proposal on behalf of National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), and mentioned Gates’ relationship with Epstein. Warren Buffett had my microphone cut and I was arrested me on the spot. I spent three hours in custody. The ridiculous charge of criminal trespassing was dropped a few days later.
Buffett, once Gates’ closest friend in philanthropy and the source of more than $47 billion in Berkshire stock funneled to the Gates Foundation since 2006, has since walked away. He left the Gates Foundation off his midyear stock gift this July for the first time in nearly two decades, sending almost $6 billion instead to four foundations run by his own children.
Buffett had a shareholder arrested for raising, in public, the very questions a law firm on Gates’ own payroll has now confirmed were worth asking. NLPC will keep asking them.
Peter Flaherty is Chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center.
